How Invasive Species Can Impact Your Home and Outdoor Areas

Regular household and garden pests are a chore to deal with. Rodents, ants, bed bugs, hornets and wasps are all vermin that need extermination before they can dig in. An infestation by common pests is generally easy to deal with using over the counter pest control, but when your yard or home becomes infested with an invasive species, you’re in real trouble. Here’s why:

No Natural Population Limiting Factors

Invasive insect species, in particular, are notorious for boom and bust population growth. They reproduce rapidly and consume the food sources for other species in the local ecosystem, including other insects and plants that are necessary to sustain avian and mammal life. As the invasive population continues to grow unchecked, it eventually collapses, leaving the natural life cycle of plants and animals in your home and yard cut short. That’s just in the yard. Unchecked breeding in the walls and crawl spaces of your home puts you and your family's health at risk if the invasive species is parasitic or carries parasites.

Rodents love to find shelter in your home during the cold months. Learn how you canhelp prevent such activity:

Harm or Kill Off Helpful Native Species

This can include plants, animals, insects and other organisms that live in your home or in your outdoor areas. Some attack native trees and plants that grow in your yard or garden, and these plants have no natural defenses and so are consumed and die. The animals that depend on those plants as a sustainable food source starve and the insects that rely on those animals for their own survival are also affected. Once the natural balance has been disrupted, it can be difficult to get your yard or home back to normal.

Can Create Ecological Monocultures

This is more typical of plants but also occurs with insect populations. Monocultures are when there is only one dominant species, and all competing species have died off. When a monoculture occurs in one section of a local ecology, other parts of that ecology begin to die off as well. What starts with hornets and wasps nesting and destroying the wooden structures of your home can lead to the death of other species necessary to sustain life in your outdoor living areas due to predation or consumption of resources.

Can’t Always Be Exterminated Through Conventional Means

Different species of insects and animals require different means of removal or extermination. What works on common field mice may not work on other invasive species, and the same is true of beetles and other invasive insect species.

If you suspect an invasive species is gaining a foothold around your Santa Clarita home or outdoor living area, call the experts at Expel Pest Management. Our team of experienced staff can help determine what you’re dealing with and eliminate the invasive species before it becomes a serious threat to your home or outdoor living space. Contact us today to schedule a consultation, and make sure invasive species don’t take over your property.